Data growth is the largest data center infrastructure challenge for large enterprises, according to Gartner, and service providers are experiencing it at an even bigger scale. Requirements for ready access to all data types has been growing exponentially, increasing pressure on storage professionals and storage platform manufacturers to solve the data availability and reliability problem -- from the transport layer up to the application layer.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers and some large organizations are solving this problem by creating metro storage clusters, sets of geographically distributed storage platforms providing ready access to users when needed. These clusters are capable of spanning across data centers in multiple geographies using advanced storage and Layer 3 technologies. Some examples of these technologies include storage replication, virtualized storage clustering at the hypervisor layer, and dedicated Fibre Channel and network links between data centers across a city, state or larger geography. The data can be accessed from virtually anywhere with high availability and reliability.

There are three primary value propositions to consider when making any technology decision, all of which are equally important to take full advantage of the technology being selected. I call this the values triangle of a technology decision, which can be used to examine the business, technological and operational values of a purchasing decision. Cloud providers can apply this model to evaluate metro storage cluster adoption.

Business value of the decision

The primary reason any business should implement a given technology is that it adds value in some way. For enterprise customers, metro storage clusters satisfy multiple business challenges, including disaster recovery and business continuity, and they help address security and compliance requirements.

Service providers may gain significant business value by implementing metro storage clusters as well. They can use the technology to create multilayer data storage packages for customers, depending on which metro storage cluster design they chose to deploy. Requirements would dictate the design, architecture and services to be offered. Cloud providers could offer every layer of service within the data storage package at a premium service charge. Consider Replication as a Service or Disaster Recovery as a Service, or multisite and stretched clustering for managed services customers.

Technological value of the decision

Depending on the specific deployment, metro storage clusters could significantly increase the operational value of data management and availability.

The technological value of any decision needs to be based on empirical data, and the best way to identify the value is to look at the requirements. Metro storage clusters can solve multiple complex technology problems, such as multisite high availability, increased data reliability, stretched compute and virtualized clusters -- all of which translate into highly available applications enabling users to perform their tasks whenever necessary. User data is made available to compute clusters across multiple data centers, to the applications and ultimately to the users by means of inter-data center replication, storage area network routing, virtual SANs and other advanced storage and compute technologies.

What matters most to businesses today is data. That data can be in the form of an on-demand video service pushing gigabytes of high-definition streaming video across the Internet so the consumer can enjoy a movie night, or it can mean allowing an avid investor to make an instant trade. In either case, the data needs to be available to the application, and metro storage clusters enable this functionality and bring significant technological value to the business.

Operational value of the decision

The cost of overlooking operational value of any technology decision can be significant, both in terms of customer satisfaction as well as operational expense. Any technology being selected to solve a business and technological problem needs to conform to the basic processes, procedures and standards for business and platform operations. The ability to continuously and proactively monitor the platform and carry out simplified capacity management, performance management, configuration management and end-to-end change management are just some of rudimentary requirements for operational excellence that must not be overlooked when making a technology decision.

Platform lifecycle management becomes simpler: Scheduled outages are not a concern, and change management can support scheduled changes at any time, as long as only a single site is affected and availability elsewhere is maintained. Platform administrators can simplify performance management using metro storage clusters by implementing such advanced functionalities as Quality of Service or read- and write-anywhere algorithms that streamline bandwidth consumption across available sites while managing data replication on the back end.

As long as decision makers take into account this values triangle using facts and empirical data, the selected technology will deliver substantial value to the bottom line, including the abilities to sell additional services on top of simple IaaS, to extract significant technological efficiency out of the deployment and to create a holistic, streamlined operational structure around the technology.

About the author:Said Syed is a manager of platform engineering and architecture at Verizon Terremark, a Miami-based business unit of Verizon Communications specializing in infrastructure and cloud services.

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